Studio Series #85 Arcee

(Femme-Bot Friday #79)

Arcee doesn't have the greatest of histories in the live action movie series. Unceremoniously pulled from the first movie, she was pushed back in for the second - albeit in such a way that it wasn't clear whether she was a single consciousness split across three bodies or one of a team of three independent robots with superficially similar designs - only to be (presumably) killed off in the final battle. Fans seem to have been reasonably positive toward the original, unused movie design, but overwhelmingly unfavourable toward the so-called 'wheelsnakes' of Revenge of the Fallen.

She was then absent from subsequent movies, only turning up in the tentative reboot that was the Bumblebee movie, in the all-too-brief opening scene set on Cybertron. Even here, the reception to her design was not consistently positive, with many feeling that, while the overall design looked good enough, the uncanny appearance of her face was off-putting... And, of course, that brief CGI sequence only featured the movie protagonist's vehicle mode, so many were inclined to feel pessimistic about any toys that might come along.

But, when the toy was finally revealed, it looked surprisingly good... from most angles, at least. Let's give it the once-over, and see what we make of it.

Vehicle Mode:

I've tagged this as a 'car', but it could equally be a Cybertronian motorcycle, just with two conjoined wheels at the front, and two separate wheels at the back. It has attributes of both a vehicle to be ridden on, and a vehicle to be sat within and, while clearly nothing like G1 Arcee's traditional, animation model-based car form, it is similarly sleek and curvy. It's a vehicle clearly designed for speed (specifically in a straight line, perhaps, like a dragster), grouping her more closely with the likes of Wheeljack and Cliffjumper/Bumblebee than the heavier-duty Brawn and Ratchet/Ironhide.

While I'd hardly call it an advantage, Arcee's design in the Bumblebee solo movie is vague enough that it didn't dictate too many specific vehicle features. One of the few features that limits the design - the wheels on the backs of her ankles - wasn't even visible in the movie, but the designers nevertheless regarded them important enough to make part of the toy. They, in turn, seem to have informed the overall vehicle design to the most significant degree, with Arcee's traditional (iconic?) shoulder nacelles blending into the sides rather more readily than on the more usual car form. In spite of the obvious divide between pink and white plastic components, it all blends together pretty well thanks to the sculpted panel lining offering some distraction from the slightly larger transformation seams. While some robot mode detailing - such as the inner workings of her knees - is visible in this form, it doesn't look out of place on a vehicle, since it's located approximately where a motorcycle's engine would normally be. Similarly, the exposed inner parts on the nacelles towards the back could be taken as heat sinks, some form of ventilation, or as part of the exhaust system.

But I said at the start that she looks good from most angles... and that's most painfully true in vehicle mode. From the front or sides, she looks fantastic. Sleek, curvy, kind of like a futuristic concept bike - the Bugatti Type 100m, the Kawasaki J Concept and the Lazareth LMV 496 seem to have provided some inspiration - but then, the back end... is just the robot's chest and arms, with her hands folded in toward her torso, but still fully visible. Additionally, there's a small but significant misalignment between the section that becomes Arcee's collar in robot mode, and what looks like a small spoiler rising up from the sides of the vehicle just in front of it. Where the spoiler comes up is also substantially narrower than the span of Arcee's shoulders, leading to an even more egregious mismatch. For a wholly fictional vehicle with such a strong and distinctive front three-quarters, the back end is a huge disappointment.

Granted, her intended weapon 'storage' is supposed to mitigate this, by somewhat disguising her hands - the pistols literally just plug into her fists in exactly the same way as they do in robot mode - but I personally think they look better pegged into her nacelles via the robot mode's storage option. The obvious downside being that the robot's hands are then left on full view, completing the ruin of this vehicle's rear view. Additionally, I noticed while photographing her vehicle mode that her head peeks out below the 'cockpit'. It's only visible from a fairly low angle - pretty much directly in front of the wheels, for example - but it's one of the clearest cases of Visible Head Syndrome I've seen on a Studio Series toy since the Bayverse Ironhide.

On the plus side, the 'cockpit' interior has some interesting detailing. While there's nothing that necessarily looks like a seat, and the robot's collar piece stands above the frame of the cockpit, with no way to make it sit flush (which leaves the underside of the head just about visible below it), there's detail sculpted on there that could be interpreted as handlebars, or some other form of vehicle control. Since the nose of the vehicle is hinged for transformation, it could be lifted to accommodate a rider craning forward from a seated position above the nacelles... Though Arcee would be a rather awkward scale vehicle to find a rider for.

Paint-wise, it's fairly obvious that some applications are absent. The white on the vehicle's nose ends abruptly where it's meant to continue down to join up with the white plastic along the bottom of the vehicle. There's a sculpted ridge on each side of the vehicle that also should have been painted white. The exposed inner workings of the robot's knees and the details inside the nacelles should have been picked out in the gunmetal paint. Instead, I'd wager a good portion of the paint budged had to be used to conceal the translucent blue plastic used on the vehicle's nose, in service of the - largely pointless - clear windscreen. 

I've already mentioned the weapon 'integration', and there are no additional attachment points, so Arcee's guns are either exhaust pipes - be they held in her hands or tabbed onto the nacelles - or they're spare parts. It's disappointing that there are literally no other options... but, without wishing to labour the point, it's really no more disappointing than having the robot's chest and arms fully exposed at the back of the vehicle.

Robot Mode:

All things considered, Arcee's robot mode is about as close to the movie CGI as anyone could hope for. In common with all the Studio Series figures, there are obvious caveats, not least in terms of her paint applications, but even a quick look at this toy shows how the line has been going from strength to strength with its current designers and engineers.

There's no question that this figure has a feminine appearance, as far as robots go, but it's achieved largely without resorting to the cheap, lowest-common-denominator approach of giving her robo-boobs. Yes, her chest protrudes and is comparatively pronounced in and of itself, let alone in comparison to her slender waist, but it's a single unit, pushing forward most in the middle rather than at the outer edges. From the waist down, I'll admit that she does have the stereotypical robo-g-string and (mostly) slender, 'bare' legged look that many designers use, but the legs weren't designed to be sexy in human terms - their shapes and proportions are discernibly alien, even before you get down to the two-toed feet and ankle-mounted wheels.

She's also another movie bot who presents more armoured outer shell than inner workings, leading to an overall quite smooth appearance, in common with her G1 appearance. The only mechanical detail sculpted in is on the inner face of her forearms, her knees, a thin silver of her belly and at her collar. It's all very nice and intricate, but it accounts for a very small portion of her surface area and, while that's actually nothing unusual with the Bumblebee movie characters, it presents a huge - and, frankly, welcome - difference from that other line of TransFormers toys in their Cybertronian form... and I think it's pretty obvious why Hasbro decided to hold off on making a War for Cybertron version of Arcee until Earthrise, since it allowed their already low-effort approach to slacken off even further by turning her traditional vehicle mode into a literal shell around the robot, which then led to an ostensibly Cybertronian Elita-1 from the same mold. This toy, constrained as it was by the movie CGI, shows what can be accomplished when unfettered by the need to meet the unreasonable expectations of those fans who are fixated on the near 40-year old animation models.

What's quite strange is that there are a couple of blocks on her chest that look like separate pieces, slotted in to fill gaps. These have been painted to match the areas they're plugged into, but the density of paint just isn't there, so they look pale pink rather than white, and stand out more than they otherwise would, due only to the seams. On the upside, she has sculpted detail in some surprising places, most notably the inside faces of her nacelles.

In terms of paintwork, it's just as obvious in robot mode that she's missing some of the finer details, such as the white trim on the armour of her shoulders and forearms. However, it's the missing metallic applications on the inner forearms and for the exposed workings of her legs that are most keenly felt. The main advantage Arcee has is that her colourscheme is primarily just the bold contrast of pink and white, leaving the handful of grey plastic parts carrying the weight of representing exposed metallic components. In the context of the Studio Series line, there are definitely toys that come out worse for the miserly paint job.

Arcee comes with two pistols which are essentially, as mentioned above, intended to remain in her hands at all times, in both robot and vehicle mode. Her hands are sculpted with an open grip and are weirdly small, to the point where she doesn't seem to hold her weapons especially well, not helped by the fact that their 5mm grips are so short - small as her hands are, these pegs are shorter. When not in use, they can tab onto the bottom of either nacelle via the slots on either side of the guns, but leaving them dangling down doesn't look great, and they're too long to peg in pointed upward. It seems to me that a peg on the inside of each nacelle would have been preferable, or having a tab on one side of each gun so they could tab into the slots on her thighs.

As mentioned in the intro, one of the main complaints about Arcee's appearance in the Bumblebee movie - and which has translated into complaints about the toy - was that her face was not so much uncanny or overly detailed, as much as it was absolutely nightmarish... and, looking at the toy, it's hard to disagree. It's made up of segmented panels, and has a vaguely insectoid quality about it, with her 'cheeks' coming across more as mandibles. The way the mouth and jaw are sculpted, any shadow over the face gives her a defined handlebar moustache that wasn't even suggested in the movie CGI. The paintwork of the head is OK for the most part - her 'ears' are picked out in a pink paint that matches her upper body, while the face itself gets a lighter shade, and the small dent on her forehead features a tiny dab of gunmetal paint. While I certainly don't believe this is one of the worst TransFormers head sculpts to have graced Studio Series (quite the contrary - it's unusual and distinctive, which I like, and looks more-or-less like the traditional Arcee, with the addition of an aerial on one side of the helmet), it is very much let down by the use of gunmetal paint for the eyes, as she ends up looking dead-eyed.

Despite such a radically different vehicle mode, Arcee's transformation echoes the Ratchet/Ironhide mold in the way the upper body breaks apart, concertinas out, and then lays over the top of her vehicle mode. Some of it was a little confusing to begin with - in particular, the way the head doesn't quite fully stow inside vehicle mode, but sort of slips part way into the 'cockpit' area, to then be concealed by the front canopy. The torso does most of the heavy lifting, in fact, with the legs simply straightening out and being held together by a sequence of interlocking tabs and slots from the wheels on back to the hips, while the arms simply bend via the bicep joint rather than the elbow, and then hang either side of her chest, to be covered over by her nacelles. I've seen some complaints about Arcee's front wheels not staying tabbed together, but I've not found that to be a problem as long as everything else is properly tabbed in and the legs are fully straightened and aligned. Others have complained that she doesn't stand well, but that invariably turns out to be because the calf panels haven't been popped back out of their vehicle mode position, which forces her to lean backward. Honestly, my only problem with this figure is that the nacelles don't tab into anything in robot mode... and, being mounted on fairly loose ball joints, this means they're easily jostled out of their intended position, resting against the folded up vehicle shell on her back. There were several photos I had to re-take because one or both nacelles and drooped, or swung off at a weird angle. For the most part, I'm really impressed by how she compresses down and so completely changes shape between robot and vehicle mode, even though her legs barely do anything. As Arcee toys go - particularly over the last few years, and across a several continuities - her robot mode backpack is remarkably compact and clean, let down only by that lack of a fixed position for her nacelles in robot mode.

Despite being comparatively small - even by the standards of contemporary Deluxe class toys - Arcee is no slouch when it comes to articulation. She has an enormous range of ankle tilt - because it's used in transformation, to flip her wheels back and forth, tabbing into place in either position - along with the usual 90° knee bend. The range of her hip swing is about 180° forward-to-back, but it's slightly less than 90° forward and slightly more back, and they can easily lift 90° out to the sides. On top of this, there's a rotation joint in the upper thigh that has about 90° range due to the design of her thigh's outer  armour panelling. She has unrestricted waist rotation as a result of transformation, the arms would be able to swing a full 360° at the shoulder if it weren't for the nacelles on her back, which knock it down to about 270°, and they lift 90° out to the sides. Her bicep rotation is unrestricted, and she has an effectively double-jointed elbow due to the transformation joint in the bicep, but then her wrists only move for transformation, and sit at an awkward angle in robot mode. Her head is on a ball joint that offers unrestricted rotation (albeit having to tilt her head back to clear the pegs behind her collar), an excellent range of up/down tilt, and a tiny bit of sideways movement. Curiously, the ball joints on the nacelles are supplemented by mushroom pegs... but I see no clear reason for these, as they're not required for transformation, and offer no clear benefits in robot mode.

Obviously I'm a little biased in favour of Femme-Bots, generally, but this interpretation of Arcee has to be the best Hasbro have thusfar produced, and certainly among the best of this recent crop of Studio Series figures. It goes to show not only what the designers of the movie CGI can accomplish by taking only the most general inspiration from G1, but what the design team at Hasbro and Takara Tomy can accomplish when given free rein to create a vehicle mode, even within the constraints imposed by the existing CGI. As impressed as I've been with Brawn, Wheeljack and Ratchet/Ironhide, I feel a special appreciation is due for Emiliano Santalucia for his concept art of Arcee's vehicle mode, as well as to Sam Smith of Hasbro and Shu Umezu at Takara Tomy for their excellent work in turning the movie design into a real-world plastic toy.